The Situationists began practicing détournement by détourning literature, political theory, visual art, and film. Usually they practiced détournement for political reasons, but occasionally they wielded the practice for personal causes. Once, when Debord and the SI were low on funds, Debord asked Bernstein to write a commercial novel with the intention of making a bit of money to fund further Situationist endeavors. She called her two novels of semiautobiographical fiction “détournements of literature, life and love.” (They’re also delightful little reads, though somewhat maligned by both the author and her husband.)
The Situationists took détournement very seriously. They practiced what they preached, freely offering up the contents of their published writing in the Internationale Situationniste for anyone to use and/or alter, without consent or acknowledgement. Détournement wasn’t plagiarism, stealing an idea to pass it off as one’s own. Nor was it quotation, which acknowledged a boundary between various elements an artist or writer wanted to fuse together. Détournement was like welding: two pieces of steel melted, reformed into one singular object, then cooled to solidify the bonds, rendering the prior separation between the previously disparate pieces not just invisible, but also irrelevant.
Détournement was also a political act against corrupt culture, which they called “The Spectacle.” To détourn maps and novels was to raid culture, like politically motivated vandalism, like graffiti. In Debord’s most famous text, The Society of the Spectacle, he described a world and culture corrupted by capitalism, sponsored by business and bureaucracy, creating complacency in the masses rather than creativity. The Spectacle removes authenticity from creation, Debord wrote, and needs to be destroyed. Détournement was the best weapon against it.
Reading The Society of the Spectacle and Debord’s various writings about détournement, Molly took special note of something Debord wrote just before he began to shift the Situationists away from aesthetics and toward politics: “To reach this superior cultural creation — what we call the Situationist game — we now think it is necessary to be an active force in the actual sphere of this era’s culture (and not on the fringes of it, as we cheerfully were …)”n When Debord talked about being an “active force in the actual sphere” of culture, he meant the Situationists should become a political action group. When Molly read it, she thought about becoming a pop star.
Molly recognized the Situationists’ somewhat hypocritical relationship with mass culture. On one hand, they distained and disparaged the Spectacle, and considered celebrity the human incarnation of it. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord wrote:
The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived … The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others … The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are.o
On the other hand, the Situationists felt the need to stay abreast of popular culture so they could détourn it. As Odile Passot puts it in the Afterword to Semiotext(e)’s translation of Bernstein’s first novel All the King’s Horses, “the Situationists themselves were avid spectators, especially of certain films.” In the early years of the SI, when they still talked about building cities, Debord, Bernstein, and Constant discussed using mass-cultural tropes to create Situationist desires in the public. They also discussed the problematic hierarchy between “high” and “low” culture, ultimately disavowing the idea of highbrow versus lowbrow, which indirectly endorses the pop culture in general.p
Molly Metro considered the Situationists’ two-faced relationship with pop culture an important part of their ultimate aesthetic failure. She concluded that their semi-disavowal of mass culture was what relegated them to the fringes forever. To truly shift the desires of the public, you had to be a global figure that didn’t have to face term limits. As a budding singer-songwriter, Molly concluded that in order to create a Situationist world, one would first have to become a pop star, a one-woman “active force.” This is part of what makes her disappearance so baffling. If her ultimate goal, as she wrote several times in the notebook Taer perused and copied from, was to finish the work Debord and Constant never completed by remaking the world in a Situationist image, why did she disappear at the height of her powers?
To begin realizing her Situationist goals, Molly Metropolis first had to make herself into a star. She began working with a producer named Davin Karl, who had written and produced songs for Britney Spears and Kelly Rowland. Karl suggested she change her persona from a Fiona Apple disciple to a dance-pop artist. Molly dove into the challenge, relying heavily on détournement. To build an identity authentic in its artifice, she developed part-Britney coquettishness, combined with what Molly called a “dirty Outrun Electro synthesizers” aesthetic, combined with Freddie Mercury, combined with Holly Golightly. Although somewhat influenced by R&B, Molly worked hard to distance herself from the genre by heavily borrowing from disco instead, knowing many people at the record companies would rather lump her in with the black women who sing R&B than add her to the sable of white girls who sing pop.
Molly created a new self with a new image, the way she hoped the world would remake itself into one huge Situationist city. At the time, Molly was still adolescent, a teenager, and still discovering her identity; like so many of us during our teenage years, her personality was still in flux. Molly Metropolis was what Miranda Young wanted to be, so she became it.
As she began remaking herself into Molly Metropolis, she read about Debord’s friend Pinot. As a “Situationist Artist,” Pinot produced something called industrial paintings, which the Situationists endorsed before Pinot’s expulsion from the SI. Industrial paintings weren’t made using machines, but were created to feel repetitive and mechanic, to undermine the idea of the “unique gesture.” It was an extension of détournement and undermining of the authorship by refusing to use bylines in Internationale Situationniste. Molly decided the musical version of industrial painting was the pop song. She didn’t just allude to her influences; she invoked them bodily. She détourned. As Molly wrote in an e-mail to Berliner on October 26, 2009, “I consider the first year of my career as a sort of long term détournement experiment and what I learned is that at some point the détourned thing becomes un-détourned and just is. No doubt this is the point, and I’ve succeeded.” Though immodest, Molly Metropolis was right; she had succeeded. As media studies scholar Kate Durbin, founder of the academic journal Molly Skyscraper, puts it, during the era of her debut album Cause Célèbrety, “Molly literalized and embodied the spectacle.”q
In making herself into Molly Metropolis, she became much better at détournement than Debord or the other Situationists had been. At the time of her disappearance, Molly had already had more of an impact on the culture of the globe than the Situationists ever had, or ever would achieve.